I got my first period a
week before 8th grade started.
I told my mom and she hugged me and said quietly “You’re a woman
now.” I still have a hard time
understanding what about having blood coming out of the vagina makes me a
woman. To 13-year-old me, it was yet
another thing to stress about, on top of moving to a rural town far away from
anything familiar to me, and starting high school. 13 was a rough year.
That moment summarizes my entire life growing up as a
“girl”. That identity never felt like it
was my own. It was as if everyone gave
me this role to act out when I was born, and I played along. “Sure, I’ll be a girl…wink, wink, nudge,
nudge.” Then one day I woke up and realized
it wasn’t a joke. Everyone was
serious. I think that’s why I was such a
panicked teenager.
In fourth grade, I had a classmate who got pulled from
the classroom for wearing a skirt. While
Mrs. Anderson was out in the hall, gossip started flying. I heard that, on another occasion, this kid
had brought high heels to school and wore them during recess. Everyone spoke about the incident as though
it was a grievous crime. I don’t
remember ever seeing that kid again. I
think I didn’t know what to feel about what had happened. And yet, fourth grade is when I started
rejecting femininity. Now, I think about
this kid, whose name I don’t remember, and I hope they’re okay, and that they
found the strength to be themselves in a world that is so hateful to gender queer
individuals.
I think most of my gender socialization took place at
school. My parents, bless their hippie
hearts, raised me with significantly less gender indoctrination than I see in
the rest of the world. It was at school
that I learned what was girly and what was manly. I learned that it was bad to wear high heels
to school if you were designated male at birth.
I learned that it was funny when boys spoke in high pitched voices. I learned that femininity was bad, and people
who expressed themselves as such would get made fun of. I even perpetuated this behavior by saying
“you scream like a girl” to a boy I was chasing at recess. Because teasing boys by calling them feminine
was cool.
I feel fortunate to have never had transphobia aimed directly
at me as a child. Even though every time
I put on a dress, it feels like I’m cross dressing, I have the privilege of
looking like a woman to the rest of the world, so wearing a dress in public is
acceptable. In fact, I could probably
wear any type of clothing and it would be acceptable. I have a certain amount of male privilege in
that wearing “men's” clothes is cool, even encouraged. It’s always okay to want to be a man, but
wanting to be a woman, or even remotely similar to one, is a gross insult.
All through elementary school, I was so concerned with
who was first, who was the best, who was the fastest. The schools I went to perpetuated this kind
of thinking by celebrating the top scores, and giving “extra attention” to the
lowest scores. As I get to know the kids
at Neighborhood House, I’m seeing this played out in their dialogue as well,
and it makes my heart ache. This is not
what school should be about. I have an
idealized image of what I think school should be, and I can’t tell if this
motivates me, or disenchants me further.
Maybe both.
I was a science kid.
From when I was four until I was about 6, I wanted to be a
paleontologist and travel to the Gobi Desert and discover a new kind of
dinosaur. Then I wanted to be an archaeologist
and study Ancient Egypt. I wanted to be
an astronomer, an astrobiologist, a forensic anthropologist, a paranormal
researcher. I have declared two majors
in my college career that deal with science: architecture and biology. Physics, chemistry, and biology are
interesting to me on a basic level, but I'm not that great at remembering the
intricate details of cell anatomy or chemical formulas. And because it doesn't come easily to me,
I've almost totally stopped thinking about it as a serious career
possibility. If I wasn't good at
something, or if it didn't come easily to me, others told me (and then I told
myself) I shouldn't pursue it or that it wasn't right for me. It was only the past year that I started
telling myself that I can and should pursue whatever I want, but that whatever
it is, it has to make me happy. Although
I've been fortunate to be interested in certain subjects without being told I
couldn't pursue them because I'm a “girl”, now that I'm coming into my gender
identity, I wonder if there is any space for me in the binary world. Can I pull off being a queer scientist? Can people in positions of power allow me to
be a queer scientist, or a queer anything?
There was this after school club that I was a part of in
8th grade. I forget the name
but it focused on girl's issues. We
talked about girl things, or rather, other people talked about girl
things. I was too shy to speak up. One time, these two juniors were talking
about how if a guy gets a girl pregnant, he can walk away, but the girl has to
deal with going through the pregnancy.
All of the burden of raising the child or choosing to get an abortion
would fall to her. I remember being
shaken up by this conversation. I
couldn't relate to it, outside of the fact that I was 13 and not mature
enough. I never thought to myself, “Wow,
that could be me if I'm not careful.” Instead I thought, “That's never gonna
happen to me. Thank God I don't have to
deal with that.” I never ever dreamed of
having kids. A couple years later when I
was 15 my mom asked me if I wanted any. I
said “maybe”, but that was my panicked response. I hadn't given the topic a lot of
thought.
A
good deal of my body dysphoria comes from having a uterus. It's not so much the period cramps as it is
the expectation other people have for me and what I choose to do with my
body. I can't have conversations about
uteruses with cis women. Last time I
did, I got dizzy and almost passed out, my dysphoria was so bad. My mom talks about her grandkids as if they've
already been born and she's told me that she wants my kids to call her
Lola. My kids. Those two words
feel so wrong when I say or think them.
It still feels like a part of that girl charade. “Yeah, sure...'my kids'.”
For most of high school, I was homeschooled and took
online classes from Utah Virtual Academy.
The public schools in Escalante, Utah weren’t up to my family’s
standards. When I was a junior, I joined
a book club. Reading was a way for me to
escape the frightening world I found myself living in. The club met maybe twice a month to discuss
books we were reading and to recommend new books to each other. During the very first meeting, it was decided
that we would all read City of Bones by Cassandra Clare. My mom picked me up a copy from St.
George. The cover has a half-naked man
on it. I was a little embarrassed by
it. However, I consumed it quickly and
fell in love with the characters. This
book introduced me to gay people. As
weird as that sounds, being gay is not really a thing in southern Utah. Or if it is, it’s extremely silenced. I felt mysteriously connected with these
characters, and this connection still persists.
My attraction for boys has never felt heterosexual, or what I imagine
heterosexual feelings to be like. I never
identified as gay until recently though.
I didn’t think I could, since I’m not male-bodied. Also the dialogue surrounding homosexual
people in southern Utah didn’t allow for me to think along those lines. I often joked to myself that I was a gay man
trapped in a woman’s body, but I couldn’t be serious about it. I didn’t know about transgender people at
this time. I wish I had.
After finishing City of Bones, my fellow book club
members and I held a Skype session and discussed it. I was wanting to discuss the gay couple, but
everyone focused on the main character’s heterosexual relationship. No one mentioned Magnus Bane or Alec
Lightwood. I was disappointed. I got the feeling that everyone had either
ignored those characters or was too scared to mention them. Afterwards, I felt alone in that I couldn’t
share my love for gay characters with anyone.
It’s hard for me to write this. Sometimes delving into my past, looking for
early signs of my trans identity can be really uplifting, validating, and
encouraging. Reflecting on the negative,
though, can cause me a lot of dysphoria.
Thinking about how much worse my life could have been, and thinking
about other trans people who do go through worse, is suffocating. This semester I’m finding opportunities to
write about trans issues, and that feels good.
I’m not the best writer, but I at least feel like I’m helping and
educating others on my own terms. For my
job, I wrote a review of a book about a 9-year-old trans girl. In it, I talked a little bit about the
marginalization of trans people, and especially trans people of color. This review was published in the store’s
newsletter and was sent out to people all over the country. I packaged some of the outgoing newsletters
and for each one, I hoped that my review would spark some positive change. I hope that I can make a difference for queer
people at some point in my life. I don’t
know how I can do that yet but I’m confident I’ll find a way.
